mail.ru

Rocket Internet-backed food delivery business Foodpanda is divesting yet more of its international holdings. Today the company announced that it would sell Russian Delivery Club, its operations in Russia, to Mail.Ru Group for $100 million.
Foodpanda said the sale would help it “further focus in our core regions”, by way of investing the proceeds in its other operations. It comes… Read More

A changing of the guard is afoot at Mail.ru, the Russian Internet giant that owns the country’s most popular email service; Russia’s Facebook equivalent Vkontakte; messaging service ICQ and a number of other properties. Co-founder Dmitry Grishin has announced that he is stepping down as CEO, to be replaced by Boris Dobrodeev, the current CEO of Vkontakte.
Grishin said in a… Read More

Some big shareholder shifts at Vkontake, the social network with 92 million monthly active users that’s often described as Russia’s Facebook and has been embroiled in political controversies that resulted in the ousting of its founder, Pavel Durov. Mail.ru, the publicly-traded Internet giant, has now taken full ownership of the company, by buying the 48% it did not already own… Read More

In September, Oktogo, one of the larger hotel-booking sites in Russia, acquired Travel.ru, Russia’s equivalent of Rough Guides, for around $2 million. Today, Oktogo has announced that it will rebrand the entire company as Travel.ru, as it pivots into a new role as an integrated, one-stop travel shop that pairs travel commerce with travel information. The new Travel.ru is also… Read More

In the aftermath-analysis about what exactly happened in the Facebook IPO, and what it might mean for the future, here’s one side-effect to the east of Nasdaq: Vkontake, the top social network in Russia, which shares a shareholder with Facebook, Mail.ru, has decided to delay its own IPO.
The news was confirmed by the company’s CEO Pavel Durov on Twitter. In Russian, he tweeted… Read More

Mail.Ru has issued a preliminary trading statement for the fiscal year 2011. The largest Russian-language Internet company, is looking at a margin outlook of 50 percent this year according to CEO Dmitry Grishin, speaking on a conference call, and plans to reinvest the cash to improve its products. Net income in the second half of 2011 almost tripled year on year to $122.9 million. Shares were… Read More

Bigpoint, the German online gaming outfit, has signed a partnership with Russia’s Mail.Ru Group, which will see the two companies offer select gaming titles on each of their respective portals. The idea is to help Bigpoint expose its wares to the Russian speaking markets, while Mail.Ru gets broader European distribution.
Targeting Russian speaking gamers, Mail.Ru will house Bigpoint… Read More

When I first heard about Mail.Ru’s “Russian Code Cup“, I was instantly reminded of that scene in The Social Network whereby Mark Zuckerberg is interviewing for a programing intern for Facebook. Two candidates are fighting it out for the position in a hackathon/drinking game in which they have to drink shots every 10 lines of code and every 3 minutes or something like that. Read More

Latest Crunch Report

Mail.ru Group, formerly known as Digital Sky Technologies and notable investor in Internet sensations Facebook, Groupon and Zynga, among others, has filed for a $876 million IPO on the London Stock Exchange that would value the investment firm at up to $5.7 billion.
That valuation is higher than expected (earlier reports predicted a $5 billion valuation). Read More

Internet investment group Digital Sky Technologies (DST) today formally announced the acquisition of Russian social network Odnoklassniki.ru, which we reported on last week.
DST has bought out out the minority shareholders in Forticom Group Limited – which it now fully owns – and Odnoklassniki, and interestingly transferred its interest in the Polish social network Nasza-Klasa.pl… Read More

Internet investment group Digital Sky Technologies (DST) today formally announced the acquisition of Russian social network Odnoklassniki.ru, which we reported on last week.
DST has bought out out the minority shareholders in Forticom Group Limited – which it now fully owns – and Odnoklassniki, and interestingly transferred its interest in the Polish social network Nasza-Klasa.pl… Read More

A unit of international media group Naspers, namely its subsidiary Myriad International Holdings, is to buy a 28.7% stake in Digital Sky Technologies (DST), the Russian firm behind investments in notable Internet companies like Facebook, Groupon and Zynga.
Naspers will be investing $388 million in cash, and contribute its 39.3% stake in Mail.ru into DST. Concurrently, Mail.ru management and… Read More

Earlier this month, we reported that Google would be replacing Russian search leader Yandex as the default search engine and ad server on Mail.ru, the most popular online destination in the country with more than 50 million unique monthly users.
This morning, Mail.ru confirmed (in Russian) that it will be replacing Yandex with Google as its default search provider starting January 2010. Read More

Earlier this month, we reported that Google would be replacing Russian search leader Yandex as the default search engine and ad server on Mail.ru, the most popular online destination in the country with more than 50 million unique monthly users.
This morning, Mail.ru confirmed (in Russian) that it will be replacing Yandex with Google as its default search provider starting January 2010. Read More

It’s all over the news in Russia this morning: Mail.ru, the leading Internet portal in the country, will reportedly be replacing Russian search king Yandex as its default search provider and hand over the keys to Google again.
While nothing has been official confirmed by either party yet, the information comes from solid sources, according to multiple publications. Read More

It’s all over the news in Russia this morning: Mail.ru, the leading Internet portal in the country, will reportedly be replacing Russian search king Yandex as its default search provider and hand over the keys to Google again.
While nothing has been official confirmed by either party yet, the information comes from solid sources, according to multiple publications. Read More

Digital Sky Technologies (aka DST), the Russian Internet holding company that holds stakes in several major Russian-language social networking and communication players and notably also recently invested in Facebook, is melting two of its largest portfolio companies together into one online powerhouse.
Astrum Online Entertainment, itself formed by DST after merging five online game companies… Read More

When the WSJ broke the story about Russian tech investment group Digital Sky Technologies looking to buy a stake in Facebook for $200 million – a deal that would value the private company at $10 billion in preferred stock – there was still some uncertainty about whether the firm was gunning for a seat on Facebook’s board of directors as part of the investment offer, of if… Read More